Hipster influence in metal defined

Over the past 20 years, death metal musicians have changed missions somewhat, combining low, brutal vocal stylings with melodic guitars — almost like mashing together Judas Priest's music with deep, throaty Cookie Monster vocals. But generally the mission has stayed the same for all death metal bands: brand your bands with an almost unreadable logo, be scary and play the hell out of your instruments.

That's where the Black Dahlia Murder changed things up. For the past 10 years they've stayed true to death metal's roots and sound, but have packaged and presented it in more of a tongue-in-cheek, punk-rock way — like they can't be bothered with all of death metal's rules and restrictions.

"It seems like people want for you to be categorized so cut and dry," singer Trevor Strnad told KillYourStereo.com earlier this month. "It's like bucking the stereotypes within the death metal scene. I used to look at it like, 'These are my people, I can't wait to just be surrounded in death metal.' Now, it's like, they look at me and I have short hair and they make judgments about me."

Translation: He wanted death metal to provide a surrogate social group.

Our flower power elders were making the very same nonconformity arguments. Their grandparents carousing in the downtown speakeasy were saying the same thing. Hipsterism is just another generation of conforming and fitting in with the nonconformist crowd.

The real split is between excellence and incompetence. Nonconformity in this case is just a means of rationalizing away underperformance while participating anyway. Social group is spot on.

We torched our cultures, lands, religion and languages for supposed justice and fairness then left everyone without any sense of belonging. The result is people trying to cram themselves in where they have no business and leaving a shambles in their wake.

That has been the most dumbest thing I've read in a while. Isn't Ghost just releasing something new? Now you'll have to hear about it non-stop for the next few months until they once again disappear to the shadows to find the next flavor-of-the-month. Maybe it is grindcore with feminist lyrics, oh, that is so ironic.